It's not often that a county's register of wills race becomes national news, but in Post-Kim Davis America, it seems like anything is possible.
From The Times Herald:
[Sharon] Thomas, a Republican, told The Intelligencer newspaper that she will not personally issue any same sex marriage licenses if she wins the race against incumbent Democrat D. Bruce Hanes.
Instead, as in the now-famous case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who spent five days in jail after defying a court order to issue same-sex licenses, Thomas said she will seek court permission to allow the licenses to be issued by a subordinate.
“I am opposed to gay marriages on religious grounds, and my conscience will not allow me to sign off on marriage certificates for gay couples,” Thomas, an ordained minister who is serving her second nonconsecutive term as Pottstown’s mayor, told The Intelligencer. “People should not have to violate their conscience to run or to serve.”
We could get into the whole "don't run for an elected position if you can't fulfill all the requirements" rigmarole, but that's almost secondary to the fact that Montgomery County holds a symbolic place in LGBT Pennsylvanian history. It was in this south-eastern county that Pennsylvania's first marriage license was issued to a same-sex couple in 2013, before the state's ban on same-sex marriages was declared unconstitutional in federal court. Allowing an elected official to disregard marriage equality in the very place where it took its first steps in the Keystone State would be sad indeed.